Once there was a daddy, a mama and a 12-year-old son. The mama and daddy loved their only child but they didn't dote on him and make him lazy. They showed him by their actions how to love and honor God.
On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the mama and daddy were at the local Wal-Mart shopping for Christmas presents for you-know-who. There were so many things they wanted to buy for him it was hard for them to make up their minds. AND they were working with a pretty tight budget.
They walked by the bicycles and saw a real whizz-banger of a bike. The regular price was $199 but on Black Friday and Black Friday only it was on sale for $149. The daddy brought up to fact that the last bike they bought for their son was a 22" type plane Jane when the son was 9-years-old.
Well, the son was now twelve and hung around with several boys who had some pretty spiffy 26" bikes. All of them had multi-speed gears. And, you guessed it, the gang loved to speed off on their 26" bikes and leave their son way behind trying to catch up with his old 22" one speed bicycle. It was all in fun, of course, and nobody really meant any harm.
It was going to be a stretch and some things were going to have to be put on the back shelf for a while, but they bought the whizz-banger and hid it at Uncle Bob's house until Christmas. The parents were almost overcome with joy. They could hardly wait to see the expression on their son's face come Christmas morning.
Well, Moms are Moms and they won't be anything else. And this mom couldn't keep it a secret. The next Monday when Dad went to work, she spilled the beans to their son. But, she made him promise faithfully that he wouldn't let on to the dad that he knew he was getting a whizz-banger of a bicycle for Christmas.
The son promised and never said a word. However, for the next month, he was riding that brand new bike all over God's creation........in his mind, that is. He thought about how fast he was going to ride it. He pictured himself racing along with the gang and even leading the pack at times. And just wait 'til that red-headed, green-eyed Cindy Lou Smith saw him riding it. She was really going to be impressed.
He thought about that bike even though he had never seen it. He thought about riding it all over town. He thought about riding it out to the country to his best friend's house. He thought about doing wheelies and jumping ramps like all the other guys did. If you could count up all the miles he rode that bike in his mind, it would have added up to over 3,ooo miles in less than thirty days.
The end
Doesn't that sound like something we all would do? Be honest on a few things. Before you and your spouse got married, didn't you daydream, or could we say, think about it.......a lot? How far did you drive that new car before you actually bought it? And, how many times did you re-arrange the furniture in that new house before you bought it? How many rose bushes did you put in the front yard?
Be honest, now. Before we actually made decisions in our lives, we thought--or daydreamed the things we would do. The more we thought happy and joyous thoughts about those decisions, the more eager we were to make whatever decision we had to make to bring our happy thoughts to reality.
This whole AHV parable is an illustration. Of course, the dad is our Heavenly Father. The mom is the Holy Spirit and the son is us. The Bible says that the Father loves to give us good gifts. The Father promised us that He would open the windows of Heaven and pour us out a blessing if we paid our tithes. He promised that by the stripes of Jesus we were healed. And promises of joy, happiness, peace, contentment, abundance, divine favor and so on and so on and so on. Why are we so backwards and shy when it comes to thinking about those promises coming to pass?
It's because we are not spending time in God's Presence. We've spent years and years in church. We've spent years and years listening to the pastor. We've spent years and years singing songs. We've spent years and years serving the church. We've spent years and years developing relationships. And we don't have enough power to blow the hats off of our heads.
What we HAVEN'T done is spend time with HIM. When we spend time with Him, we begin to assimilate His personality, His heart, His desire, His ability, His power. We begin to see the entire universe from the perspective of the Creator. We begin to realize how deep the Father loves all of mankind and not just those that we hang with every day. As we begin to realize how much He loves us, it will dawn on us just how weak the devil is and how victoriously strong we as believers are. Instead of satan being our enemy, we'll see him as he really is, the biggest loser in the universe. You'll wonder why we even pay him any attention.
We'll get more in depth in this in future blogs. But, look at how God feels about daydreaming. He TOLD Abraham to do it. In Genesis 15:5, God told Abraham to look at the stars and see if he could count them. He promised Abraham that that's how many children would come from him. It was 15 years before God brought Isaac into their lives, but every night Abraham could not help but get a glimpse of the promise of God by looking at the stars. God was telling Abraham to think about the END of the promise. He told Abraham to picture those stars as his children. Every night, Abraham's faith rose a little bit higher as he looked at the stars and remembered the promise.
We believe we're going to a heaven that we don't know how to get there but go up. We believe that one day we'll go flying through the air in the rapture. We don't exactly know where Heaven is and there's no way that we could explain the rapture to anybody. But we believe these highly implausible things are the absolute truth. If someone asks us why then we just say, "Because God said so."
If we would dare, we could use that same logic to daydream and place our faith in every single one of the other promises of God. It's going to happen because God said so. Do you know why most promises don't seem as real to us as salvation and the rapture? Because we don't picture those answers to pray in our minds like we have done Heaven and the rapture.
Get the picture? (That was punny.)
More good stuff to come. Stay tuned.
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